Macro base stations generally employ maximal ratio combining (MRC) receivers. An MMSE/IRC (Minimum Mean Squared Error/Interference Rejection Combining) receiver can reduce the perceived interference, improve the effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR), and improve user throughputs. While MMSE/IRC is typically employed across the antennas of a given sector, emerging Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) techniques would allow joint processing of antennas across multiple sectors and thus provide the potential for even further gain. In order to perform MMSE/IRC processing in CoMP, a covariance estimate is generated. MMSE/IRC performance is heavily dependent on the fidelity of this covariance estimate. Current methods for CoMP produce covariance estimates suffering from an inordinate amount of noise.